Here’s my attempt to re-create what my mom made from time to time when I was a kid. I use to hate it because the bitterness was too much to handle, but now it’s what I usually order when I go to Chinatown. (Supposedly, as one grows older, one loses taste buds. Maybe this explains why I can go beyond the bitterness and actually enjoy this dish.)

Here’s the recipe..

Ingredients

2 bitter melons (aka bitter gourd; the greener the less bitter; don’t buy any with yellow coloring because it means the melon is old)

1 TBSP salt

1 pound of thin (maybe 1/4 in.) slices of beef

1 TBSP soy sauce

1 TBSP chinese cooking wine

1 TBSP water

1 tsp corn starch

2 TBSP canola oil

1 inch of ginger (julienned)

2 TBSP black bean sauce

Directions

Cut the bitter melon in half length-wise and scoop out the seeds and the white pithy center

Cut the melon into 1/8 in. slices

Put the melon pieces and the salt into a bowl and mix well (this will help draw out some of the bitterness. Let this sit for 30 minutes.

Slice the beef into 1/4 in. strips and put it into a medium sized bowl (we’re going to marinade the beef in this bowl)

In a small bowl, mix the soy sauce, water and cooking wine

Stir in the cornstarch and mix well

Pour the mixture onto the beef and mix until the beef is well coated. Put in fridge to let it marinade

Rinse the melon in some water and drain well

Heat the canola oil in a wok or frying pan

Add the ginger and sautee for 30 to 60 seconds

Add the bitter melon, a pinch of salt and sautee for a few minutes until the melon is just a tad soft on the outside but is still crisp on the inside (if you want the melon to be softer, you can blanche the melon first before you sautee it)

Add the beef and the black bean sauce

Sautee until the beef is done…probably a couple of minutes

Add salt to taste

Just put a serving of this over a bed of steamed white rice and you’re good to go! Enjoy.

I’ve been aware of MTASC for awhile now but haven’t tried it until today.
It all started out with a search for an Eclipse plug-in for Actionscript. I chanced upon this page which contains a great tutorial for acquiring and testing out all the tools you’ll need to start compiling .swf’s.
These are the pieces you’ll need:

Flashout – eclipse plug-in that gives you a function similar to “Test Movie” in Flash

MTASC comes with all the classes for MX and 8 (the site mentions its successor, haXE, which will support Flash Players 6-7-8 and 8.5 as well as Javascript and Server-Side scripting.)

I had a little bit of trouble working with Flashout on my Mac running OS X Tiger. When I was trying to configure Flashout in the Eclipse preferences I kept getting an error message saying that it couldn’t find the FlashoutMTASCPreferences class. It turns out that Flashout requires Java 1.5 which doesn’t come with Tiger. This page gives you the fix. Essentially you have to download Java 1.5 from Apple’s site and then you need to point the CurrentJDK folder to the 1.5 folder.

OK…it’s late and I’m trying to prepare for my trip to the Post Office tomorrow. I hate waiting on lines, I don’t have a postal scale, and I’m trying to figure out how much postage to put on my letter. I have 4 sheets of 8.5 x 11 copy paper in a regular envelope…let’s say the envelope weighs the same as a sheet of paper…so I need to figure out how much 5 sheets of paper weigh.

Basically, the weight of the paper that is listed on the ream(500 sheets) is the weight of 500 sheets of 17″ x 22″ paper (not 8.5 x 11) !
So, from one sheet of 17 x 22, you get four sheets of 8.5 x 11. This means that a ream of 20 pound 8.5 x 11 paper actually weighs only 5 lbs.